Actually, It Is Rocket Science

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Outside Online April 2002

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The Big Idea: CASE STUDY #3: Inside a High-Tech Skunk Works
Actually, It Is Rocket Science

"WELL, THAT SEEMED to go well," Blair tells Hastings as we cross the New Balance parking lot. New Balance didn't tell him yes, but it didn't say no. The next step will be to haggle over the $30,000 grant Hastings is looking for, and perhaps to focus his proposal.

When we get back to the lab, Blair has one more whiz kid he wants me to meet. If Blair is the Batman of CSI, then Jennifer Blundo is, for now, his Robin. A 21-year-old double major in mechanical engineering and management science, Blundo looks like your run-of-the-mill MIT student—a young woman in jeans and gray fleece, toting an overstuffed backpack that threatens to pull her over backward. But even among MIT's elite undergrads, she's a standout—an avid runner who has her sights set on the Boston Marathon, and who aims to get a master's in mechanical engineering and an MBA. Last fall she co-led a team of 17 in constructing the iClimb. Talk to her for ten minutes and it's easy to imagine her pitching some future company to investors, just as she is now selling me on the belay gadget.

"You've got a wireless remote control right on your harness, so you can let out more rope or pick up the slack with the press of a button," she explains. "If you fall, a magnetic particle brake automatically stops the rope and holds you. There's a fail-safe brake and manual clutch if anyone ever gets stuck." Place it on the floor and the iClimb eliminates the need for a belaying partner—"at least in a gym," she stipulates.

This spring, Blundo and her team plan to give demos to climbing-wall manufacturers for possible commercial development. Blair thinks it has definite promise, though he's aware of the downside of innovation in a business world fixated on the bottom line. "It certainly works," he tells me. "The big question in my mind is how the climbing gym's liability insurance company will receive this. Are they more liable for an injury caused by a bad human belay or a faulty machine belay?"

FOR NOW, BLUNDO, like some of her fellow CSI gear mavens, can't be bothered to worry about insurance company qualms. She's already moved on to her next project: helping New Balance research an ultramarathon shoe. Meanwhile, Abel Hastings has yet to hear from New Balance, but still has his sights set on a sneaker revolution. And Marianne Okal—what of her inquiries into the mystery of carabiner destruction?

"It worked!!!" Blair e-mails me, referring to Okal's experiments with the failure-detection mold. "We'll want to reproduce the results, but this seems a viable solution." Okal, he adds, is about to graduate and has made a list of where she'll send her résumé: Black Diamond, Dynastar, MSR, Völkl, Salomon, and Petzl. But first she plans to do what any self-respecting, newly-minted grad of the MIT Center for Sports Innovation might do: ski Chamonix.

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